We recently took out a look time to try Nexon’s fantasy MMORPG Vindictus that puts players in the shoes of one of nine potential protagonist characters in a huge story-driven story arc quest focused campaign. Originally launched in Korea in 2010 the game has been around some time, but for this author personally it’s a game we’d never had the pleasure of trying out, and so putting a few hours to one side we checked out the game with our extended play to see what we thought.

It’s clear from the start that the game has Asian roots, apparent from the beginning with the look of the characters and constantly reinforced throughout our session, so in honesty we were cautious when it came to what exactly we should expect as Asian MMOs tend to lean on the grind side. First up were the 9 available characters we could choose from, as opposed to classes these characters had their own look, background story and unique abilities; essentially they were classes but you were choosing to play as a character. Sort of. Shortly after the opening mission you’re asked to identify yourself and it’s here we get to name and customize our appearance so essentially the characters are just classes after all, it’s just a weird way of doing things. The character customization options weren’t terrible, there were quite a few hairstyles and colours, albeit the vast majority of them were locked until you purchased them from the appearance store in game, but you got to see what was available at least, then there were a few sliders to change body shape and that’s about it.

Then we jumped into what I guess would be described as the tutorial, usually a part of the game that we just try to burn through, but we’ll happily put our hands up and say that it was possibly the best opener/tutorial to any MMORPG that we’ve played.

With a mix of in game cinematics and voice acting the scene begins with the town soldiers preparing to fire on an enemy climbing the old wooden belltower, a camera change shows us a freaking enormous white tarantula climbing the walls and our boys preparing the ballista to shoot it down. An NPCs interception has us trying to reason with this “guardian” instead and escorting her up the belltower instead. Inside we’re ambushed by gnolls and have to fight our way through them to make our way up the levels, smashing our way through barrels, wooden fences their ranged units take for cover and, as the Archer character Kai, peppering them with arrows. At one point our escorts is caught up in a partial wall collapses and knocked out, forcing us to carry her and use our melee kick ability to beat our way through enemies in a “This is Sparta!” style literal ass kicking. Up through the tower then onto the outer ramparts we final made our way to the roof of the main building where we end up facing off against this titan. The switch between cinematic camera angles and general level design gave us a “The Witcher” meets “Dark Souls” feel to the battle with some dynamic “Dynasty Warriors” style action combat thrown in. It’s extremely fun. The battle continues until we reach a point where the soldiers bellow start firing their ballista, a rain of huge iron arrows flying through the air whilst we fight and smashing all around us just felt epic and then triggered the spider to start climbing the bell tower, a cinematic camera angle change whilst we were fighting had us trying to shoot it down as it climbed… well, we’ll leave the ending for you to check out. If this was the beginning of the game we were suddenly very much looking forward to the rest.

The problem is that after the hype and the buildup there was a jolt as the pace slowed down considerably and the amazing amount of effort that had been put into that tutorial suddenly seemed to drift away. The game cuts to a scene with us talking to the NPC we had escorted up the tower, but we were suddenly greeted with still illustrated images and rafts of text to read through as our dialogue, very similar to old RPGs. She didn’t even appear in the 3D generated bedroom that we were in, something repeated with all the quest givers in instanced buildings and rooms; the method the developers have gone with is more showing you the scene you are in and small icons representing the different characters currently in the room, then their larger illustrated portraits pop up as they speak. It’s fine for an RPG, it wasn’t terrible, but it was a very stark money saving/convenience/time saving method that conflicted with the setup we’d just had, though it isn’t for every NPC, only the instanced areas such as the various buildings in town where the NPCs that are in there can change each time.

Picking up quests was simple enough, though there’s a lot of talking (reading) to get through or skip through, which ultimately ends up in our side quest panel and, at least for the first area, would lead us to the dock where we would check out a travel board to choose our location, choose the difficulty, assemble a party for our excursion and then organize our weapons and gear; it was a very interesting system that builds up the team play and planning element prior to setting off on your big adventure and being transported there. For our playthrough we didn’t get past the initial Perilous Ruins zone, each time we completed a quest and headed back to town we were sent back there, though the level itself was different for each quest (though repeatable as is the Asian RPG way) with a completely different level and map layout and with new mobs appearing as we progressed the story.

Combat is pretty great, it is very fast paced and quite explosive, as an Archer we could run and gun shooting enemies as we moved, peppering them with arrows, aiming and throwing our carried objects like spears or even elements of the world like rocks and barrels and even dead enemies. It definitely doesn’t feel like the MMORPG combat we’re used and so once again was a breath of fresh air to play. Though the early content was far from challenging it was fun nonetheless, with elements of cinematic cutscenes, puzzles to solve such as avoiding an enormous rolling spiked cylinder, being ambushed and fighting bosses in some really cool looking and well-designed areas. Whilst the level designs were really great, letting us find hidden passages by knocking down walls and taking vantage points on enemies below as an alternative route, the graphics are looking a little bit old, though working with what they’ve got the attention to detail is remarkable and the dip in graphical quality is easy to overlook.

Our one sore point was not being able to PVP, though we were still only in the early levels at the close of our playthrough, we were disappointed when checking out the PVP tab that the combat modes were reserved for level 40 players, marketing it more as an end game feature to keep players engaged (though players could watch them in the spectator mode). Whilst we understand that there needs to be endgame to keep players interested later on, it was still frustrating not being able to check out how the combat style held in in player versus player. That aside we ultimately really enjoyed our time playing the game, though it has its low points and Asian quirks like we would expect, the game is first and foremost extremely fun and combat is well executed and exciting, and as a free to play game we say why not just give it a shot?

SCORE:

• Graphics: 6


• Gameplay: 7


• Performance: 7

• Pros: Fun cinematic and dynamic combat, a variety of characters/classes to play as.


• Cons: Occasional performance/lag issues that would stutter the game and sound, the missing 3D NPC models in the instanced quest areas is a little weak.

Rating: 6.5

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2015 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.